COLORADO SPRINGS — No doubt, the Most Rev. Michael Sheridan has found many moments of joy in his nearly 10 years as bishop of the Colorado Springs Diocese, but one event a few years ago really makes him beam.

“I have never been more proud as a bishop than I was on the day I dedicated the new building for the Marian House and Hanifen Center,” he says.

That doesn’t sound like a man who is interested in moving a cornerstone of the diocese’s charitable mission from its home at 14 W. Bijou St. But at least twice this year, the mayor’s office has floated the idea of relocating Marian House operations, which include a soup kitchen and a host of services to help the homeless and others living in poverty.

Mayor Steve Bach said it’s not a top priority, but as he makes a major push to tackle homelessness in the city and boost the business climate downtown, it’s something he might want to pursue down the road — especially if his plan on homelessness includes a proposal to locate an array of services in one place.

“I hope eventually that Catholic Charities will want to be part of a campus approach and moving that facility in that location,” Bach said in an interview about a month ago. “It does result in a lot of homeless activity downtown that deters a lot of citizen involvement and commerce. Is there another way to solve that? And if they were to move, can we make them whole?”

Mark Rohlena, president and chief executive of Catholic Charities, said recently he’s aware of the conversations taking place about the Marian House, but no one has approached him directly. And, like the bishop, he doesn’t seem eager to relocate its operations.

A downtown soup kitchen has been a fixture in Colorado Springs since the early 1970s, though it moved around before settling in at a site near the Interstate 25 exit at Bijou Street.

“Downtown is where the need was,” said Steve Handen, a former priest and longtime community activist, who started the first soup kitchen in his home shortly after moving out of the rectory in 1970.

Handen was part of a small group of activists who eventually came to be known as the Bijou Community. They lived communally in several places and eventually moved to a four-unit complex on South El Paso Street that gave birth to an ad hoc soup kitchen.

Things got so crowded that the group got permission to use the basement of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on South Tejon Street. That church moved, and the group had to shop around for another location.

“There was a lot of opposition,” Handen said. “No one thought it was a good idea.”

But three churches eventually offered the group a place to hold its soup kitchen, and the one that was most suitable — the Baptist church at Kiowa and Weber streets — served as its home for about 10 years.

Once again, however, the Bijou Community had to look for a new site for the soup kitchen when the church decided to remodel. The journey led the group to the Marian House, a 100-year-old building on West Bijou Street that had served as a convent.

The group began serving people from the Marian House in 1985, and Handen said it operated without much fanfare, in part because the layout of the property kept most of the activity out of sight. Catholic Charities of Central Colorado took charge of the soup kitchen in 1994. In 2007, the soup kitchen served 147,749 meals; last year, it reached 209,873 meals.

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